Flower Arrangements • Marina Cruz

Jun 6 to Jun 27, 2013 • Tall Gallery

In this show of new sculptural pieces and still life paintings, Marina Cruz revisits the traditional genre of floral arrangements and recasts them as exquisite representations of memory. It is Cruz’s way of exploring the everyday; a way of seeing anew and seeking ordered beauty in the fabrics and floral motifs embellishing the ordinary.

The exhibition is a composite of three evolving series, representing distinct yet connected aspects of Cruz’s artistic practice. She reconfigures the textures and forms of fabric and petal, dress and bouquet to embark on a ritual of recollecting.

In her series of painted dresses on printed fabric, the artist threads through her previous works dating back from 2010. For the artist, the medium is not only physical, but also biographical. This time, she selects fabrics worn and handed down by her maternal grandmother, setting them against dainty printed textiles; the resulting composites linger with an arresting yet familiar sense of comfort.

Cruz also shares a new series of still life paintings, capturing artificial blooms on canvas. Fake flowers, commonly derided or deemed inauthentic and gaudy, are used as subjects and depicted in the freshest and most delicate of tones. Here, the act of painting is not merely a photographic recording, but also a means to alter how one can be seen in a new light.

A highlight of the exhibition is Cruz’s Flower Dresses series. Casting a skirt in fiberglass and mounting them on steel bars, Cruz creates 16 pairs of sculpture flowers that connote the fragile and cyclical motions of unfolding and blooming.

In this collection of quiet yet tensile beauty, Cruz merges the materiality of both fabric and flower, presenting them as signs and tokens of celebration and remembrance.